Take a Deep Breath. Some Post-Debate Thoughts

I don’t watch stock car racing, especially for the cheap thrills when somebody crashes. “Vroom, vroom” does not excite my testosterone. And I didn’t watch the Presidential debate last night.

Instead, we took a couple of old friends visiting from out of town to see the Gilbert Castellano Jazz Sextet at Lou Lou’s, the stylish nightclub embedded in the Lafayette Hotel. They were blown away by the experience, the attention to detail, the ambiance, and two sets of amazing music. I felt good at the end of the night and woke up feeling like I’d done something important, sharing something marvelous  with some pretty damn wonderful people.

If there’s one thing that surviving three bouts with cancer taught me, it’s that a good life matters.

So the debate happened, and the President stepped on his tie. Or something like that. He was overwhelmed by a confident huckster with a sales pitch disconnected with reality. Every word out of the former President’s mouth was a lie; and he looked good (relative to the other guy on the stage) doing it.

Heather Cox Richardson called it:

• It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

• It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

I remember when Ronald Reagan blew a debate and lost seven points in the polls just one month before winning the election. I remember when Sen. Bob Dole’s debate victory was widely considered a blow to then-President Clinton’s re-election. I remember Sen. John Kerry won the debate and lost the election in 2004. And I remember when Sen. Mitt Romney erased then-President Obama’s lead in the polls with a debate victory characterized as “New Ideas.”

I liked this summary from Aaron Rupar at Public Notice:

• In short, it’s probably more accurate to say Biden lost the debate than it is to say Trump won it. The race has been very close for months and I expect it to remain that way. It’s a shame, however, that we’re coming out of last night talking about anything other than Trump’s criminality and unfitness to serve. The bottom line is that Republicans set the bar ridiculously low for Biden, but instead of making them regret it, he reinforced the perception he’s lost his fastball.

There have been and will be lots of calls for Biden to step down from the 2024 contest, including my friend Timothy P Holmberg on these pages.

I disagree. My sense is that this is a situation where we need to look at what’s really possible. I think it’s too little too late. It’s magical thinking. States are readying ballots and Democrats have already built out an infrastructure wrapped around their candidate. Not to mention that a party claiming to be defenders of democracy would end up having their elite at the convention pick a candidate.

It’s not that I’m thrilled about Biden on the ticket, I’m just taking a longer view and looking for opportunities amidst the chaos.

Richardson again…

• About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

Democrats should do themselves a favor and play the hand they were dealt. The country is in okay shape, the Supreme Court is pissing everybody off, and the Republican Congress is worthless as tits on a slab of bacon. And Trump is a liar who doesn’t care about anybody else but himself.

The analysis being pumped out about the first debate of 2024 reads more like a movie review that ignores some mention of what the film is about. And, as Hillary Clinton said, “We’re picking a president, not ‘best actor.”

President Biden comes off sounding fine if you read the actual transcripts of the debate. Trump sounds like the unhinged one who uttered some truly remarkable things. What people will remember from this debate is that it re-enforced notions they already had: Biden is old, Trump is a con man.

Going forward, there is a matter of framing. Ease off on Trump vs Biden as the marquee event. Let the man play the role (temporarily) of a wise advisor who can see his time has come and is doing forums with every Blue State Governor that he can.

Trump can not win if he’s running against the issues. The road to the good guys winning is framing the choice this November as Trump versus abortion, Trump versus democracy, Trump versus climate change, Trump versus saving lives from gun violence, etc. And, lord knows, Project 2025, the antithesis of democracy.

Democrats, on the other hand, need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. Do they really think the party that let Sen. Dianne Feinstein carrying out her duties while incapacitated will win younger voters? How can they ignore the almost consensus public view that our system is broken, and particularly politics, based on seniority, not merit?  This is how we ended up with the party’s geriatric leadership. (I’m old, so I get to say these things.)

Hamilton Nolan sees today’s dilemma as a case of “you get what you paid for:”

• I am a big believer in the power of grassroots politics. In this particular case, though, it will take something more—a reform of the “Washington consensus,” that dreaded amalgamation of the collective greed and fear of thousands of the most detestable white collar people in the country. Washington is not run by Biden and Schumer and McConnell and Miriam Adelson because of the grassroots. 

• “Get those old ghouls out of there” has been a pretty standard point of agreement for regular people of all political persuasions since the beginning of time. What we need right now is a recognition by the class of people who have built their own careers under the current structure that the current structure for political advancement needs to be blown up. 

• Just as our economy could stand to be more socialist, so too do we need to socialize and inject true democratic accountability into the way that we produce our leaders. That means the fundraising system and incumbent protection system and all the other things that have benefited many current elected officials of the Democratic Party need to be reformed. Seriously. That will be a much harder thing to swallow for the political class than “Replace Biden with Gavin Newsom” will be.

Calm down, folks.  I’ll quote the ancient Persian biblical phrase that’s helped me get through hard times: 

This, too, shall pass

Finally, here’s Lyz, writing at Men Yell At Me:

• The good news is it’s only June. No normal voter watches debates. And we have plenty of time to start a few more distracting proxy wars before the election. The other good news is that what happens during a debate simply doesn’t matter much. Every moment and sound bite will be cut down, clipped, processed, run through the memeification, social media quip, and political analysis spin machine until whatever was said or communicated will turn into a Rorschach test of stupefying proportions. 

• Winning elections has never been about logic or policy, but about what fiction you could package and sell about America and what it was or could be. Which story is the most compelling and which one is shouted the longest, loud enough to make it last until the election.

• And what strikes me so often is how little these moments matter. That in just a few days the incomprehensibility of fentanyl machines and “Black jobs” will be disappeared into the giant maw of our media appetite – gone with the Steve Forbes presidential bid and that time everyone got mad at Obama for talking about salads.

***

Friday Finds in the News World

***

Biden had an off night, so let's have a dictatorship now by Alicia Norman

• Republicans now say the Great American Experiment didn't quite work out because all the women folk and darkies got a bit too uppity with all that talk about liberty, equality, and free will.

• All those things were just for pale-skinned brotha’s.

• Now, they gotta reset things back to normal. As a result, they plan to take everything back and insert God in all kinds of crevices and spaces—including schools and a woman’s uterus.

• Praise be to Cheeto!

***

No longevity benefit from multivitamins, study finds via Semafor

• A huge study found no benefit for healthy adults taking multivitamin supplements.

• The research looked at 400,000 people over 20 years, and found no evidence that those taking vitamins were at less risk of cancer or heart disease, and in fact were slightly more likely to die during the study period, although that could not be shown to be causal.

• Around one in three Americans regularly use vitamin supplements, but there has never been good evidence showing that they have a health benefit outside of people with a specific vitamin deficiency: The new study adds weight to the suggestion that vitamin buyers are mainly acting as a middleman between health-food stores and the sewage system.

***

Uber and Lyft agree to pay drivers $32.50 per hour in Massachusetts settlement via The Associated Press

• Drivers for Uber and Lyft will earn a minimum pay standard of $32.50 per hour under a settlement announced Thursday by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, in a deal that also includes a suite of benefits and protections.

• The two companies will also be required to pay a combined $175 million to the state to resolve allegations that the companies violated Massachusetts wage and hour laws, a substantial majority of which will be distributed to current and former drivers.

• Campbell said the settlement resolves her office’s yearslong litigation against the two companies and stops the threat of their attempt to rewrite state employment law by a proposed 2024 ballot initiative.